Nursery web spider

When I first wrote this text, here’s what I said: “Okay, call me the boy who cried wolf: it’s been almost a century since the gray wolf, or lobo, roamed the Texas Hill Country. But wolf spiders in central Texas are another matter. Here’s a golden oldie of a picture—with the gold coming from a sunflower—that shows a large wolf spider I photographed in Pflugerville in 1999.” But I was indeed the boy who cried wolf, and I misidentified the spider. Thanks to a detailed comment by Spider Joe (which you can read below), I now know that this is not a wolf spider but a nursery web spider, probably Dolomedes vittatus.

I hadn’t seen this picture in years, but I’m surprised at how good a job the early digital camera, with its paltry 2.3 megapixels, did in recording the dark wolf spider and the bright sunflower.

22 Responses

I found one of these large ladies in my compost heap this summer with her egg sack in tow. Down on the ground she was hard to catch with the camera because of her camouflage. You really have to look hard to see her. Not so with your photograph, there’s great contrast with that sunflower as backdrop. Love it!

Thanks, Rebecca. It’s easy to be fascinated by spiders, though many people are afraid of them. For nature photographers they’re usually good news, because I’ve noticed that they tend to hold their ground rather than flee, so I have time to keep taking pictures.

Thanks, Dawn. In light of your name, I’ll mention that I took this picture not at dawn but at dusk. It was getting to be dark enough that I had to supplement the available light with the camera’s flash.

Thanks, though I don’t think I can take much credit for the depth-of-field control on this one, as that early camera didn’t offer a lot of choice. The use of flash may have caused the camera’s algorithm to choose a small aperture, with consequent increase in the depth of field. In any case, we can be happy with the result.

Oh, we have lots of spiders too, but very few are big or strong enough to bite through the skin of a human. I think garden spiders (Araneus Diadematus) are the biggest. I am wary of the banisters along the bridges, their fencelike structure is home to a lot of spiders. In the twilight and at night, when the lamps overhead attract insects, the spiders all come out to feast.

I have to laugh at your comment about the early digital cameras. I love my new Canon Rebel, but my first digital camera took some nice shots. This one certainly is a keeper for you. The eye was definitely there before the technology caught up.

A few years after the time of this picture I went around with two cameras, one loaded with slide film and the other digital, and took pictures of some of the same things with both cameras. I’m sorry I didn’t do that from the outset, because the originals of some good pictures exist only as low-megapixel versions.

This is actually a Nursery Web Spider (family Pisauridae), not a Wolf Spider (family Lycosidae). This looks like Dolomedes vittatus to me.

Wolf spiders look a lot like Nursery Web Spiders. If you have a picture as good as the one you have here, there’s an easy way to tell the difference. Both have 4 smallish eyes foremost (anterior), but their rear 4 eyes (posterior) on Pisaurids are about equal in size and about equally spaced and in an even arc. On wolf spiders the middle posterior eyes are noticeably larger than the outside posterior eyes, and the outside posterior eyes face more sideways than forward

If you don’t have as good a picture as this, you can also go by the height of the cephalothorax. Pisaurids have generally flat cephalothoraxes. A wolf spiders’ cephalothorax rises from the back and gets pretty tall in front, somewhat steep on the sides.

This is a fantastic find. Dolomedes are not often encountered, and I have never ever seen on one a flower. Beautiful!